Laser devices in which mode-locking is achieved by an active modulator or by a passive, saturable absorber within the optical resonator of the laser devices are known. The mode-locking induces the laser to generate short pulses having a periodicity, which corresponds to the round-trip transit time of the light in the resonator. The optical loss of the saturable absorber in the resonator reduces with increasing intensity, thus short pulses can be generated by appropriately selecting the saturable optical loss. The frequency of the output signal of the mode-locked laser may also be doubled, tripled, or multiplied by another integer factor.
The US patent application 2006/0023757 discloses a mode-locked laser, system and method in which mode-locked optical pulses are frequency-converted using an intra-cavity frequency conversion. The mode-locked laser comprises an optical resonator, a laser gain element disposed in the optical resonator providing optical gain about a fundamental laser frequency, a mode-locking modulator disposed in the optical resonator, and a nonlinear optical material disposed in the optical resonator for performing optical frequency conversion in which an input pulse at the fundamental laser frequency is converted into an output pulse of reduced power at the fundamental laser frequency and an output optical pulse at a harmonic frequency. There is also an element disposed in the optical resonator which reduces the spatial, temporal or polarization overlap of output pulses at the harmonic frequency with optical pulses at the fundamental frequency and, thus, reduces the interference between the harmonic frequencies and the fundamental frequency. The mode-locked laser device can be reverse biased by supplying a voltage across the structure. For this purpose contact layers are provided: one at the bottom of the structure and the other one near the top of the structure. On the surface of the other contact layer is a coating, which is reflective at the harmonic frequency and antireflective at the fundamental frequency. The bias voltage may be modulated at a harmonic or sub-harmonic frequency determined by the cavity round-trip transit time.
The above referred laser uses active pulsing to improve second harmonic generation. The nonlinear material component of the laser converts the frequency of the radiation generated by the laser to a second harmonic frequency thus affecting that the infrared radiation is converted to visible radiation.
A semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM) is an optical semiconductor element comprising a saturable absorber with a certain optical loss. The optical loss reduces with increasing optical intensity of input radiation. Normally saturable absorbers in electrically pumped mode-locked VECSELs are used with a focusing lens to increase the intensity for saturation or by introducing reverse bias over the saturable absorber in order to temporarily reduce the absorption of the incident radiation. Saturable absorber mirrors are often implemented in laser cavities for passive mode-locking of lasers.